Slow TV

Is The Way You Watch TV About To Change Drastically? Yes.

Pull up a chair and grab some popcorn because you can now watch Earth from outer space 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. NASA started live-streaming Earth from the International Space Station’s External Payload Facility of the European Space Agency’s Columbus module on April 30th as an experiment to see how video equipment would hold up in space. It’s also not a bad way to get clicks.

High school students involved with the High Schools United with NASA to Create Hardware (HUNCH) program actually helped design the project and will be assisting with some of the operation on the ground. Another helper for NASA was Elon Musk’s SpaceX who transported the cargo using their Dragon spacecraft on April 18 (if you’re into that sort of thing, you can watch the launch and arrival at the space station on YouTube).

As far as ‘Slow TV’ goes, this is probably the best there is, the best there was, and the best there ever will be (to quote a wrestling legend). If you haven’t heard, Norwegian TV has been broadcasting things like a fireplace, knitting, birds, and a train for hours and hours and hours. One of their broadcasts featuring a boat had half the country tuning in at some point, according to the BBC. As you are probably doing right now, this has had people all over the world scratching their heads as to why this is so popular considering the way people’s attention spans are considered to be shrinking. But somehow, NASA’s version of ‘Slow TV’, makes the idea sound a lot more awesome. For instance, wouldn’t you want to be watching live when aliens invade? I know I would.

In all seriousness, a glimpse at a meteor or comet may pull millions of eyes into the house on their computer screens instead of out watching with a telescope. And that’s either cool or terrible, depending how you see it (excuse the pun).

Sorry to break it to you, but you actually can’t see Earth all the time from the NASA live stream. If you see a black screen, it means Earth is in darkness. However, there is a trusty map that shows where the station is at any given time and a highlight pack of footage you can watch too.

While this may be the first HD real time live stream available for free online, it isn’t the first time HD cameras were strapped to the International Space Station. Vancouver-based company UrtheCast (somehow pronounced Earthcast), installed their own $17 million camera a few months ago and have plans to stream near-real time streams.